Stink bugs represent a victory for men in the gender wars

TOWN SQUARE

Women have been gaining ground in the gender wars, although they still lag behind when it comes to salaries, especially in the Lehigh Valley, as reflected in a front-page story in The Morning Call on Sunday.

Lehigh Valley women earn 72.4 cents for every dollar earned by men, it was reported, while the salary gender gap across the nation ranges from 77 to 82 cents for women vs. a buck for men. For Pennsylvania women, generally, it's 77 cents.

Susan Averett, an economics professor at Lafayette College, said the gender gap is due to "choices women make with respect to family." Still, the gap is less than in 1970, when women were paid only 59 percent, on average, of what men received for the same type of work.

Averett's point about family choices was reflected in an item on The Morning Call's website the following day. It referred to a statistical report by the Insure.com website, which was not very comforting to men in terms of what they actually are worth, in dollars, when it comes to family chores.

"Fathers of America, you may consider yourselves indispensable," said the Reuters story, "but a new survey says you're only worth about one-third as much as mom around the house."

I don't know how objective that survey was, but I bet it did not fully consider one of Allentown's most famous contributions to America — the 1998 introduction of halyomorpha halys, the stink bug, which has become a major agricultural problem in 34 states, mainly in the East.

I'll get back to that, after we consider the new survey by the insurance industry, as revealed in its Insure.com website.

It said its "Father's Day Index" was "to calculate the value in wage terms of the work a father typically does around the house." The annual figure for such work by males was $20,248. A similar "Mother's Day Index," in April, said corresponding tasks by women were worth $60,182.

Talk about a gap!

A fat lot the Insure.com people know. They never interviewed me.

Anyway, the survey looked at typical wages for various tasks, such as barbecuing, yard work, car maintenance, handyman, and pest removal. There also were categories involving things like "helping with homework," but all our children are grown, so I skipped over those.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics, it was reported, estimated the hourly wage for cooking at $11.999, so if three hours a week is spent on barbecuing, that comes to a little more than $1,870 a year. I am the worst cook who ever lived, and my wife is the best, so I stay away from barbecuing and related tasks. My son, Neal, does a great job at his grill, so I'll let him know it's worth $1,870.

I'm better as a handyman, as long as the stores do not run out of duct tape.

"Driving" chores are worth a bit more than barbecuing, and I think I make a big contribution there. My wife, on the other hand, drives herself around quite a bit, but she's not much of a chauffeur. You should hear her gripe about the rare times I called her to come pick me up when something happened on a bicycle ride, such as my derailleur falling apart on Mountain Road in the boonies of Berks County. I thought she was never going to find me that day.

The yard work category includes mowing grass and snow removal, and this is where there's real conflict. You wouldn't believe all the aggravation I suffer because of the way I cut the grass, and I admit I complain about the number of flower plants contaminating our yard; my wife even puts the dratted things inside the house. Snow removal, however, should not be listed as a chore. It's fun, especially in this part of Pennsylvania, where it almost never snows, compared to Eden, N.Y., where I grew up.

That brings us to "pest removal," which the survey valued at $15.65 an hour. This is where I should move up in the standings.

We have not had a mouse in years, but when we did, my wife could not bear to touch a mousetrap, so I earned the entire $15.65. When it comes to stink bugs, she will catch one and flush it instead of waiting for me to come home, but otherwise I've been stuck with the stink bug duties since the things first appeared in 1998.

That was when the first such bugs in America were spotted in Allentown and identified by students at Muhlenberg College. Since then, the bugs have become a major problem for fruit and other crops. The only good thing about them is that they're easy to catch. (I blame them on my wife because they are indigenous to Japan, which is where she's from, even though she came to America decades before they did.)

I don't care if the Insure.com survey claims that guys are worth only a third of what gals are worth when it comes to work around the house. That's only because women simply cannot handle some things outside the home, which is why we've never had a woman president.

On second thought, that may not be such a good dialectic, when you consider some of the duds we've elected in recent decades — and seem poised to do again this year with another choice between two bipedal male versions of halyomorpha halys.